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Bee shortage threatens Lower Mainland's lucrative blueberry crop

Pollination by bees is essential to berry development, but farmers have been hit by a shortage of bee hives

Hannamarie Zerbe, an anthropology undergrad, looks over this comb from one of the hives at Johal Blueberry Farms in Pitt Meadows, Sunday, May 5. She also displays 2 disparate samples collected over a 2 day period from 2 different colonies in the Pitt Meadows area, and these will be used to determine why some colonies gather more pollen.

Photograph by: Stuart Davis
, Vancouver Sun

Lower Mainland blueberry farmers are in a desperate hunt for bees to pollinate their plants.

There’s a simple formula in blueberry farming: no bees, no blueberries.

The recent warm dry spell created ideal conditions for a bumper crop, but five to seven per cent of growers may suffer due to the lack of honey bees, said John Gibeau, owner of the Honey Bee Centre in Surrey.

The pressure on Gibeau, who supplies pollinating bees to blueberry farms, is intense. “We’ve been working 17, 18-hour days to meet the demand,” said Gibeau. “Everybody is on edge.”

The sudden, unannounced closure of two bee suppliers in Alberta left some local growers who contracted with them without bees.

“Two large Alberta honey bee keepers have gone out of business and didn’t forward that information to their clients,” said Gibeau.

Panicked growers started calling Gibeau on April 10 to say their bees hadn’t arrived and they couldn’t get in touch with their suppliers, he said.

Gibeau supplies over 4,000 bee colonies annually to B.C. farmers to pollinate 11 different fruit-bearing crops. As soon as he heard of the Alberta closures, he sprang into action.

“I called as many beekeepers as I could, hired an independent contractor to deliver bees and put our crew on standby for long working days.”

Gibeau said he is using every single colony he has to meet the demands of existing contracts, and he has brought 3,000 colonies in from Alberta and another 1,300 from New Zealand to meet the increase in demand.

Craig Seale, operations manager for Blueberry Junction, a farm that produces more than half a million pounds of blueberries annually, said he’s expecting a good year, in part because his acreage has a good perimeter of wild bees.

Wild honey bees work harder and do better in B.C.’s cool, damp climate but wild bees are in decline globally. So all blueberry farms need to have their own domestic hives to ensure optimal pollination.

Other factors behind the bee shortage are the increase in blueberry crops — B.C. blueberries are in demand, worth more than $65 million annually — meaning increasing demand for bees.

“The number of acres of blueberries keeps expanding,” said John Campbell of Campbell’s Gold Honey farm and Meadery. Pollination is an “absolute necessity” for big juicy berries, he said.

Another problem is the appearance of a an unidentified new virus among local bees.

Campbell had some losses from the virus and had to “requeen” in March with queens brought in from Hawaii.

Bringing in queens from the U.S. is difficult — every queen has to pass an individual health inspection.

Since 1987, the import of packaged bees from the U.S. has been banned in an effort to stem the spread of the parasitic varroa mite.

B.C.’s 800-plus blueberry growers manage 8,100 hectares of farms producing 40 million kilograms of blueberries a year, according to the Blueberry Council of B.C.

Studies show that honeybee pollination in B.C. is responsible for more than $160 million a year in agricultural production while the total market value of hive products, such as honey, accounts for just $8 million a year.

Hannamarie Zerbe, an anthropology undergrad, looks over this comb from one of the hives at Johal Blueberry Farms in Pitt Meadows, Sunday, May 5. She also displays 2 disparate samples collected over a 2 day period from 2 different colonies in the Pitt Meadows area, and these will be used to determine why some colonies gather more pollen.

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